Despite reluctantly dropping a ten-minute routine about the logical paradoxes of one of his favourite albums (Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not), philosophy graduate Tom Rosenthal contends that with their chart-topping debut, Arctic Monkeys lyricist Alex Turner was ‘already at odds with fame and the perceptions of his audience.’ The neurotic 37-year-old can relate. With his new show, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am, he’s returning to the Fringe for the first time since 2019 with stand-up ‘about things people have called me.’ Friday Night Dinner’s ‘Pissface’ has had mainstream creative success young in life and he’s feeling the tension between ‘honouring a fanbase and being creatively authentic,’ while worrying that this sounds ‘so highfalutin, I can’t imagine it would encourage a single person to watch it.’

Still, he’s enjoying being a new father and recently emulating Rowan Atkinson and Rik Mayall in the title role of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, betraying the ‘rank hubris’ of a performer that ‘sees those names and says “yes, I deserve to be on that list.”’

Rosenthal first arrived at the Fringe as a King’s College London student, part of a 12-strong cast playing to ‘one man who sat with an unlit cigar in his mouth the entire show.’ As an underworld creature in Orpheus And Eurydice, ‘I covered myself in body paint and contorted myself on the Royal Mile, hissing at American tourists.’ For a play about mental illness in a drugs rehab centre, he sat listening to Radiohead to try to make himself cry, before coming on stage to scream at the audience in a Polish accent.

Since then, he’s vomited on Drunk History, drunk his own urine on Bear Grylls: Mission Survive and smuggled tobacco inside his rectum for the prison reality series Banged Up. ‘I always assumed that comedians have a low shame reflex,’ he says. ‘But maybe I’m a bit further along that distribution than others. Sitcoms I’ve been in, particularly Plebs, used shame as a currency.’ Accustomed to ‘brilliantly talented writers and directors crowbarring me into the most shameful situations for maximum comic effect,’ he reckons the best comics are ‘extra immune’ to humiliation. ‘My mum says Drunk History is my finest work!’

Rosenthal’s covid-disrupted last tour found him falling out of love with live comedy. From bitter personal experience, Manhood argued against circumcising babies, ‘the only area in my life thus far I’d describe as traumatic. Making jokes about painful memories to fierce real-time judgement, I was totally drained, putting myself under more pressure than was reasonable.’ Relentlessly muttering and pacing beforehand, stand-up has ‘always seemed more of a stress to me than my peers,’ he admits.

Happily though, an unexpected ‘spiritual awakening’ as he connected with his sport broadcaster father Jim’s Jewish roots in BBC’s interfaith series Pilgrimage, has led to him bouncing back ‘in a more holistic, relaxed and joyful way.’ He now prays before shows, surrendering to a higher power, to ‘allow the audience to experience it through me, and for me to experience it through them. And yes,’ he admits, ‘I can imagine myself reading that when I was a 21-year-old philosophy student and thinking it total bullshit.’ 

Tom Rosenthal: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am, Assembly Roxy, 30 July–24 August, 6.15pm.